The field of the disclosure relates generally to gas turbine engines, and more particularly to a combustor can assembly for use with a gas turbine engine.
At least some known combustors for gas turbine engines include multiple cans oriented in an array such that the cans interact acoustically with each other. Combustion dynamics, such as large pressure oscillations, may occur when heat release fluctuations couple with combustor can acoustic tones. Some of these combustor can acoustic tones may be in-phase with the tones of an adjacent can. In-phase tones of adjacent cans may excite components in a hot gas path of the gas turbine engine, such as turbine blades, if the tones coincide with the natural frequency of the components. Moreover, in-phase tones may be particularly of concern when the instabilities in adjacent combustor cans are coherent, that is, when there is a strong relationship between adjacent cans in the frequency of the instability. Such coherent in-phase tones potentially negatively impact a thermodynamic efficiency and a flame stability of the combustor, and an operational life of the combustor and hot gas path components.
At least some known combustor arrays include combustor cans designed, or “tuned,” with differing volumes and lengths in an attempt to limit an amplitude of the in-phase coherent tones near natural frequencies of the gas turbine components. However, at least some such tuning techniques may result in a limited overall operability space for the combustor, and as such, the benefits of such tuning may be limited. Moreover, a significant amount of time and resources may be required to achieve frequency avoidance between the combustor and the turbine components. Further, an accuracy of the resulting frequency avoidance is limited by a predictive capability of the design process.